Aw, Rats!

So, about 7 or so months ago, the kids were playing outside, and I was sitting on the couch.  Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something move.  I glanced, and nothing was there.  Then it darted out from under the couch and ran across the bottom of the wall and under the tonsu cabinet.  A mouse!  Ugh, we've never had a mouse in the house before, and I was so upset.  When Tim got home, we found him under the tonsu still, and we tried to coax it out into a plastic bin so we could get it out the door.  It ended up running out and hiding in the kitchen.  It took us a couple days to realize that it had crawled through the vent under the kitchen cabinets.  We called the landlord, they brought traps and we set them.  Day after day after day, the traps would be sprung, or empty, and no mouse.  So frustrating.  Then all of a sudden there was nothing.  No mouse, no noise, no poop, no nothing.  We kept the traps going, kept getting nothing.

Skip ahead a couple months, and in the corner of the kitchen there's a pile of poop.  Each day we'd clean the poop, and find another pile, in the same exact spot.  Then we started finding towels and socks sticking out from the vents.  

Then I'd find things like this........

and this......  This my friends is our refrigerator..... yeah.....

So we called the landlord again, and he called an exterminator company that came by this afternoon, and guess what?  It's not a mouse.   It's a RAT.   

He took the baseboards off, underneath the cupboards and this is what we found....  (I'm not even going to tell you that the first word out of the exterminators mouth was a word that starts with Sch and ends with eisse)

This is from under one of the cupboards.  This just makes me sick.  The rat has been coming out at night, because we NEVER see him, and he has been taking clothing items, sandwich baggies, straight out of the box, it shredded a bag of Cheetos, and I found them all under the cabinets.  I mean, this is disgusting.  The exterminator told me he couldn't set the special traps until I cleaned.  So out comes the vacuum, and the clorox wipes, and the swiffer wet mop, and the iPod so I can distract myself from the most disgusting mess I'd ever had to deal with.

Now that it's fairly clean, or at least as clean as I can get it without ripping out the cabinets, the rat should go for the food in the boxes and traps.  They'll come back Tuesday to check each trap, and hopefully we'll be done with this.  I do have to say, aside from eating through the fridge, and stealing stuff, he was a pretty polite rat,  he only pooped in one corner of the kitchen, and as far as I can tell, he kept off the counters.  I mean I washed them every single morning just in case, and I re organized the kitchen to keep everything food related out, which was really hard to do.  I've been busting my hump every day to try and keep the kitchen spotless, to keep the rat at bay, but obviously I was fighting an uphill battle.  I had no clue how bad it really was under there.  Luckily it looks like it's just one rat, not a whole family or anything.... that would suck.